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Going-Commando/docs
ReaperOfVeriod bbce492c91 Establish that the loader produces the RAM packet forms, not the disc
Everything previously reported about five-block sub-lists and fixed-point
payloads was read out of the running game. Checking the same packets on disc
settles what the disc actually stores.

Range measured: level 0, all 29 packets named by the +0x40 tables of the 6
bounded spans, read at their span-relative offsets; 1636 whole 16-byte records
after the 16-byte header.

Neither RAM form exists on disc:

                     disc              RAM
  00 00 00 30 per    exactly 1         exactly 5
  sub-list packet
  blocks at 0/32/64  0 of 10           11 of 11
  fixed-point byte3  0 of 19           100%
  == 0x80

The 29 packets split 10 sub-list / 19 fixed-point by whether they contain
00 00 00 30 at all, and not one of the ten has the block structure, and not one
of the nineteen has the fixed-point marker.

The disc body is a compact 16-byte record stream:

  +000: 04 04 00 01 | 00 00 00 00 | 00 00 00 05 | 00 80 0e 6c
  +010: 02 00 00 00 | 05 00 00 00 | 32 00 00 00 | 0e 00 00 00
  +020: 09 00 00 00 | 00 40 3e 30 | 12 04 00 00 | 05 00 00 00
  +030: 09 00 00 00 | 00 40 3e 30 | 12 04 00 00 | 21 00 00 00

Small u32 fields and a repeating 00 40 3e 30 12 04 00 00. Per position over all
1636 records the same two outliers hold: byte 7 takes 4 distinct values and byte
15 takes 2, against 101 to 153 everywhere else.

Byte 7 is per-record, not per-packet: the first record of all 29 packets has
byte 7 = 0x00. The four-value vocabulary varies within a packet body rather than
tagging the packet, which is why grouping packets by it never separated the two
kinds.

Consequence for Phase 2: the payload is encoded on disc and expanded at load, so
a disc parser can bound it and check its signature but cannot read it as either
RAM form. Decoding it means reversing the expansion, not re-describing what the
loader produced. That is the honest boundary of what is known.
2026-10-12 02:37:55 +02:00
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